Storage and beyond

Facebook’s “Cold storage” or saving data on Blu-Ray disks

Data has a natural live cycle – the newer the data the most actively it is accessed (read or viewed). This is exceptionally the case for digital content like pictures, movies, letters and messages. Facebook has found that the most recent 8% of the user generated content accounts for more than 80% of data access.

But the old data still has to be saved for rare access. Those servers which store the old data are virtually idle and kind of useless – the only thing they do most of the time is heating the air and eating an electricity, which is quite pricey.

Facebook experiments with moving this old data (actually only a backup copy of data) into special “Cold storage” which has two particular features: it can shutdown already written disks and data can be copied from those backup disks into Blu-Ray rack of disks with special robot handling blu-ray drives loading.

Besides the fact that blu-ray disk is much more robust than spinning disks (it doesn’t afraid of water or dust for example, it can store data for 50 years until something new appears) the rack of disks doesn’t eat pricey electricity.